A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
satoumi
Satoumi is a Japanese term for a stretch of coast and shallow sea that has been managed and used by a local community for a long time and is more productive and more diverse because of it, not despite it. It covers the seaweed beds, tidal flats, fish weirs, oyster grounds, and inshore fisheries of a village, worked under local rules about who takes what and when.
Etymology
The word joins the Japanese for a village or the inhabited country around one with the word for sea, and it was coined in the 1990s as the marine counterpart of satoyama, on this site, which is the same idea applied to the land.
Notes
The idea behind both words is a direct challenge to a common assumption in conservation: that human use and ecological richness are opposed. In a satoumi the two are held to be linked, with the management maintaining conditions that neither wilderness nor industrial use would produce. Japan has taken the concept into national policy and it has been picked up internationally.